Russia. A History полностью

Lenin himself reflected this mix of fantasy and common sense. On many issues he was pragmatic and at odds with the radicals—as, for example, in the bitter controversy over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, where he dismissed left-wing communism as an ‘infantile disorder’. Pragmatism likewise informed his concessions to bourgeois specialists (whom he consistently shielded) and his view on trade unions (where he opposed Trotsky’s militant plans to conscript labour). Lenin was also cautious about nationalizing industry in late 1917 and early 1918; his ‘state socialism’, modelled on the German wartime economy, did not entail state take-over of economic life until much later. All this has inclined some historians to distance Lenin from the radicals and to depict his pragmatism as a clear antecedent for the evolutionary, gradualist plan of socialist development known as the New Economic Policy in the 1920s. Indeed, Lenin himself introduced the term ‘war communism’ in 1921 to discredit his opponents.

Nevertheless, Lenin had not shorn all the radical impulses that brought him power. He was instrumental in establishing the Communist International and pressing its revolutionary mission abroad. He also introduced radical agrarian and food-supply policies. In the spring of 1918, for example, when the new regime faced the perennial grain crisis that bedevilled both the tsarist and provisional governments, Lenin expanded the latter’s ‘grain monopoly’ into a full-scale food supply dictatorship. Similarly Lenin was never comfortable with the original land decree, which closely echoed the SR ‘socialization of the land’—all the more since the countryside was teeming with SR agronomists and surveyors, intent on realizing their own, not the Bolshevik, vision of land reform. Theirs was profoundly non-Marxist, insensitive to ‘class’ or aims of radical transformation.

That vision, which placed so much faith in the peasantry, was anathema to Lenin. Instead, he propagated a scheme of collectivized agriculture and established some prototype large-scale collective farms, appropriately aimed at the ‘poor and landless peasantry’. Although the chaos of the civil war permitted few such experiments, they provided the precedent and rationale for more Promethean efforts in Stalin’s ‘Great Turn’ of 1929–30. More telling still was Lenin’s attempt to foment class war in the villages. At bottom he applied a crude Marxist sociology of village society that divided the peasants into a small class of rich exploiters (the infamous kulaki, often simply the most competent farmers), self-sufficient ‘middle peasants’ (seredniaki), and the revolutionary and exploited ‘poor peasants’ (bedniaki). To stoke the fires of intra-village revolution, the Bolsheviks created ‘Committees of Poor Peasants’ (kombedy) to implement Soviet decrees and to drive the wealthier from power. This policy pitted neighbour against neighbour; it often fostered violence and the settling of old scores that had nothing to do with ‘class struggle’. Moreover, in many blackearth regions peasants viewed Bolshevik commissars, grain detachments, army draft apparatus and the like as worse than any conceivable class enemy. The result was a fierce civil war between organized peasant bands, sometimes called ‘greens’, and Bolshevik forces. Recent research has revealed the extraordinary intensity of this brutal conflict in Tambov and other grain-producing regions as Red Army detachments came to pacify the village. Here civil war persisted long after the Whites had been crushed, providing a primary impulse for the ‘New Economic Policy’ in early 1921.

War Communism also informed the construction of social orders, with appropriate status and disabilities. In the first constitution (July 1918), labour was a universal duty and defined social status. To the toiling classes of workers and peasants were juxtaposed the ‘formers’ (byvshie), i.e. members of the former exploiting class—nobility, bourgeoisie, clergy, and the like. All these ‘exploiters’ were deprived of civil rights and legally classified as the ‘disenfranchised’ (lishentsy). They had no right to work, but could be mobilized for menial labour or public works. Not all the social terror came from above: murderous pogroms against Jews and spontaneous assaults on clergy and other ‘formers’ were also a regular part of daily life during these violent years.